Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

Desperately, he starts slithering upwards, and deep down in his gut he realises that he has no idea why he needs to climb across this damned bridge span. But now it’s too late, and like a helpless frog he crawls up the iron arch.

It has finally dawned on Sture that Hans is serious, and he wants to yell to him to come down. But at the same time he feels the forbidden desire to wait and see. Maybe he will witness how somebody fails in attempting the impossible.

Hans closes his eyes and climbs further. The wind sings in his ears, the blood pounds in his temples, and he is utterly alone. The bridge span is cold against his body, the heads of the rivets scrape against his knees, and his arms and fingers have already gone completely numb. He forces himself not to think, just to keep climbing, as if it were one of his usual dreams. And yet he seems to be climbing up over the axis of the earth itself...

He feels the bridge span under him begin to flatten out, but this doesn’t calm him, it only increases his terror. Now he sees in his mind’s eye how high up he is, how far away in his great loneliness. If he falls now, nothing can save him.

Desperately he keeps crawling forward, clinging to the span, floundering his way metre by metre back towards the ground. His fingers grip the steel like claws, and for a dizzying second he thinks that he has been turned into a cat. He feels something warm but doesn’t know what it is.

When he reaches the bridge abutment on the other side of the river and cautiously opens his eyes and realises that it’s true, that he has survived, he hugs the bridge span as if it were his saviour. He lies there before jumping down to the ground.

He looks at the bridge and knows he has conquered it. Not as some external enemy, but as an enemy within himself. He wipes off his face, flexes his fingers to get the feeling back, and sees Sture come walking across the bridge with his jacket in his hand.

‘You forgot to piss,’ says Sture.

Did he? No, he didn’t! Now he knows where the sudden warmth came from up on the cold steel span. It was his body giving way. He points at the dark patch on his trousers.

‘I didn’t forget,’ he says. ‘Look here! Or do you want to smell it?’

Then comes his revenge.

‘It’s your turn now,’ he says, sitting down on his jacket.

But Sture has already prepared his escape. When he realised that Hans would make it down from the bridge span without falling into the river, he searched feverishly for a way to get out of it.

‘I will,’ he replies. ‘But not now. I didn’t say when.’

‘When will you do it?’ asks Hans.

‘I’ll let you know.’

They head home in the spring evening. Hans has forgotten all about the flowers. There are plenty of flowers, but only one bridge span...

The silence grows between them. Hans wants to say something, but Sture is lost in his own thoughts and impossible to reach. They part quickly outside the courthouse gate...

The last day of school comes with a light, hovering fog that rapidly thins and vanishes in the sunrise. The schoolrooms smell newly scrubbed, and Headmaster Gottfried has been sitting in his room since five in the morning preparing his commencement address for the pupils he will now be sending out into the world. He is cautious with the vermouth this morning, so filled is he with melancholy and reflection. The last day of the school year is a reminder of his own mortality in the midst of all the effervescent anticipation that his pupils feel...

At seven-thirty he walks out on the steps. He sincerely hopes he won’t see a pupil arrive without a relative. Nothing makes him so upset as to see a child arrive alone on the last day of school.

At eight o’clock the school bell rings and the classrooms are brimming with expectant silence. Headmaster Gottfried walks down the corridor to visit all the classes. Schoolmaster Törnkvist appears before him and announces that a pupil is missing from the commencement class. Sture von Croona, the son of the district judge. Headmaster Gottfried looks at his watch and decides to ring the district judge.

But not until it’s time to march over to the church does he hurry into his office and ring the district court. His hands are sweaty and no matter how he tries to tell himself that there will be an explanation, he feels very uneasy...

Sture left in plenty of time that morning. Unfortunately his mother couldn’t go with him because she was struck by a bad migraine. Of course Sture went to school, says the judge over the telephone.

Headmaster Gottfried hurries to the church. The last children are already on their way into the vestibule with their parents and he stumbles and practically runs as he tries to understand what could have happened to Sture von Croona.

But it isn’t until he is holding in his hand the prize book that is intended for Sture that he seriously begins to fear that something might have happened.

At the same moment he sees the doors to the vestibule cautiously being opened. Sture, he thinks, until he sees that the father is standing there, District Judge von Croona.

Headmaster Gottfried speaks about a deserved rest, the mustering of strength and preparation for the coming year of study; he calls on them to consider all of life’s shifting situations, and then there is no more. In a few minutes the church is empty.

The district judge looks at him, but Headmaster Gottfried can only shake his head. Sture did not show up for graduation.

‘Sture doesn’t just disappear,’ says the district judge. ‘I’ll contact the police.’

Headmaster Gottfried nods hesitantly and feels the torment increasing.

‘Perhaps he still...’

He gets no further. The district judge is already leaving the church with determined steps.

But no search needs to be organised. Only an hour after the end of school, Hans Olofson finds his missing friend.

His father, who had attended the graduation, has already changed into his work clothes again and headed out to his logging. Hans is enjoying the great freedom that lies before him, and he strolls down to the river.

It occurs to him that he hasn’t seen Sture today. Maybe he just played truant on the last day and devoted himself to coaxing an unknown star from the heavens.

He sits down on his usual boulder by the river and decides that he’s pleased to be alone. The coming summer requires a good deal of reflection. Ever since he conquered the huge span of the iron bridge he feels that it’s easier to be by himself.

His gaze is caught by something shining red underneath the bridge. He squints, thinking that it’s a scrap of paper caught on the branches along the bank.

But when he goes over to investigate what the shining red thing is, he finds Sture. It’s his red summer jacket, and he is lying there at the edge of the river. He has fallen from one of the bridge spans and broken his back. Helpless, he has lain there since the early morning hours when he awoke and decided to conquer the bridge span in secret. He had wanted to explore any hidden difficulties in solitude, and once it was done he planned to accompany Hans to the bridge and show him that he too could conquer the iron beams.

He hurried down to the bridge in the damp dawn. For a long time he regarded the huge spans before he started to climb.

Somewhere along the way he was gripped by pride. Much too rashly he raised his upper body. A gust of wind came out of nowhere and he swayed, lost his grip, and plunged from the bridge. He hit the water hard, and one of the stones in the riverbed cracked his spine. Unconscious, he was carried by an eddy towards the shore, where his head lolled above the water surface. The cold water of the river gave him hypothermia, and when Hans found him he was almost dead.